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HVTSurv: Hierarchical Vision Transformer for Patient-Level Survival Prediction from Whole Slide Image

30 Jun 2023arXiv:2306.17373archive 2025-07-28

Zhuchen Shao, Yang Chen, Hao Bian, Jian Zhang, Guojun Liu, Yongbing Zhang

Survival prediction based on whole slide images (WSIs) is a challenging task for patient-level multiple instance learning (MIL). Due to the vast amount of data for a patient (one or multiple gigapixels WSIs) and the irregularly shaped property of WSI, it is difficult to fully explore spatial, contextual, and hierarchical interaction in the patient-level bag. Many studies adopt random sampling pre-processing strategy and WSI-level aggregation models, which inevitably lose critical prognostic information in the patient-level bag. In this work, we propose a hierarchical vision Transformer framework named HVTSurv, which can encode the local-level relative spatial information, strengthen WSI-level context-aware communication, and establish patient-level hierarchical interaction. Firstly, we design a feature pre-processing strategy, including feature rearrangement and random window masking. Then, we devise three layers to progressively obtain patient-level representation, including a local-level interaction layer adopting Manhattan distance, a WSI-level interaction layer employing spatial shuffle, and a patient-level interaction layer using attention pooling. Moreover, the design of hierarchical network helps the model become more computationally efficient. Finally, we validate HVTSurv with 3,104 patients and 3,752 WSIs across 6 cancer types from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The average C-Index is 2.50-11.30% higher than all the prior weakly supervised methods over 6 TCGA datasets. Ablation study and attention visualization further verify the superiority of the proposed HVTSurv. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/szc19990412/HVTSurv.

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LocalLayer szc19990412/HVTSurv/models/HVTSurv.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 4118d3d05a3abb19 · report
ShuffleWindowAttention szc19990412/HVTSurv/models/HVTSurv.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · c80508c4f2b7cf87 · report
WindowAttention szc19990412/HVTSurv/models/HVTSurv.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 6caf9d428f7c737c · report
piecewise_index szc19990412/HVTSurv/models/HVTSurv.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · da8556b40a58f9ac · report
HVTSurv szc19990412/HVTSurv/models/HVTSurv.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 2e1eb7366e6700f7 · report

Tasks

Multiple Instance LearningSurvival Predictionwhole slide images

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerVision Transformer

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